The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic document discovery, and more particularly, to systems and methods for processing and reviewing electronic documents.
Electronic discovery is becoming an increasingly important—and expensive—component of legal proceedings and regulatory and internal compliance investigations. Before providing electronic documents for potential use as evidence in a legal proceeding or regulatory or internal compliance investigation, the documents must be reviewed and classified according to relevance, confidentiality, and the like.
The manner in which electronic documents are processed and presented to attorneys and corporate compliance officers for review has a direct impact on the efficiency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness of the review. Electronic documents should be displayed to users in a manner that is consistent, intuitive, and easy to read, and the electronic documents should be dynamically searchable and sortable. This can be particularly challenging when processing large volumes of electronic documents of varying file types, as is frequently the case in electronic discovery.
With respect to electronic communication documents, such as “chat” message transcripts, traditional methods of electronic discovery present such communications to reviewers in an email format as email formats are generally standardized formats, supportable by electronic discovery processing and review software solutions and recognizable to reviewers. However, presentation of electronic communication documents in email format has the disadvantages that lengthy chat transcript documents are cumbersome to review, and converting chat transcript documents to an email format for the purpose of electronic discovery review results in the loss of valuable metadata.
Instant chat messaging is becoming an increasingly popular means of collaboration across corporate entities worldwide. In particular industries such as securities trading, instant messaging software allows traders from one institution to concurrently engage in discussions with many other traders at the same or different institutions, in a single session (i.e., a “chat room”). At present, millions of instant messages are exchanged each day between millions of users. These messages are electronically archived and frequently sought during legal proceedings, regulatory investigations, or audits. It would, therefore, be advantageous to provide systems and methods that allow users to quickly and conveniently search, filter, review, and classify messages during electronic discovery without converting the messages to a format involving the loss of information.